Professor Steve Hanke, Johns Hopkins University and
Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, has
been working on a project called “Troubled Currencies”, which he defines as
very unstable and associated with high rates of inflation. In the countries having
those currencies the statistics are often adulterated in order to hide the true
extent of their economic problems.Professor Hanke has selected the following countries for his work:Argentina, Iran, North Korea, Syria and
Venezuela (see table above). In the case
of Venezuela the table shows an official rate of exchange of Bs. 6.29 to the
dollar while the parallel rate is today Bs. 31.59 to the dollar. According to
Professor Hanke this implies that the Venezuelan annual inflation rate is 240.1 percent
rather than the official rate of inflation of 35.24 percent estimated by the
government. Only Syria, a country immersed in a cruel and generalized civil war,
has a higher rate of inflation than Venezuela.

Although the emphasis of the study is economic one cannot
resist the temptation to link the chaotic economic conditions of these countries to the nature of their
political regimes and the quality of their governance. All exhibit
authoritarian styles of a militaristic (North Korea, Venezuela, Syria), religious
(North Korea) or populist nature (Argentina, Venezuela) and share generally high
levels of corruption. The Corruption Index of Transparency International for
2012 places countries with troubled
currencies as follows, in the list of 175 countries:

1 comentario:

The real shame of these ratings by Steve Hanke and Transparency International is that, with some slight exceptions for Argentina, Venezuela is the one country that has a legion of supporters among the American "intellectual elite."

The poverty of intellectual discourse in the U. S. is every bit as evident in those rankings as are the dire circumstances in which the people of those nations find themselves.